The current biochemicals still mostly adopt food materials such as corn starch or glucose as the carbon source, but in the long run, it may cause scarcity in food and land in the future, thus resulting in competition in energy and food production.
The data of the Council of Agriculture shows that, over 5 million tons of agricultural waste is produced in Taiwan each year, in which agricultural waste is greater than 2 million tons. In terms of vegetable waste, the water content thereof reaches 90% or more, and burying not only occupies space, but also causes problems of leakage to the landfill, thereby resulting in secondary pollution. However, the processing costs of incineration treatment may be increased due to high water content and insufficient calorific value.
Therefore, the effective recycling and reuse of agricultural waste and turning the agricultural waste into energy (such as livestock manure biogas fermentation) or resource (such as carbonization of rice husk, fish scale collagen, and extraction of chitin from oyster shell) based on the characteristics of the waste to create economic benefits have become important means for agricultural management and energy development.
In response to the rapid growth of green products in the market demand, the production and development of biogenic succinic acid and lactic acid are important. The application scope of succinic acid and lactic acid is relatively wide, and succinic acid can be used as an intermediate product for the production of coating, ink, and dye, and can also be applied in, for instance, the metal processing industry, pharmaceutical industry, food, and polymer industry. In addition to industries such as leather and textile manufacturing, lactic acid also plays an important role in the application of fields such as medicine, food, and wine making.
Therefore, the development of a method that both allows recycling of agricultural waste and promotes production of succinic acid or lactic acid has become an important topic in the industry.